As great as his USAgent story in Strange Tales was (pretty great) and as trendsetting as that Maureen Dowd thing was (pretty trendsetting?), my heart will always belong to Night Business. A nakedly unrestrained id delivering a passionate meditation on all of the things that healthy boys love the most, Ben Marra's Night Business is a comic that's impossible to get tired of.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

The guys over at the 11 O'Clock Comics podcast say some positive things about BENJAMIN MARRA'S INCREDIBLY FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF MAUREEN DOWD (A WORK OF SATIRE AND FICTION) in their 138th episode. Check it out here. They start talking about it at the 59:17 mark. They even mention my status as one of the Art Directors Club's Young Guns, which is pretty awesome. Check out the rest of their podcasts. They really know a lot about comics.

At the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest earlier this month I was interviewed by Amber Delaney over at her website Amber Unmasked. Check it out in the above YouTube video. The interview can be found in her report about the fest right here.

Valerie D'Orazio, an accomplished comic book writer and editor, now running the show over at MTV Geek, talked with me for a bit at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest earlier this month. I got a mention in her post over at the website about half-way down the page. Check it out here.

I did the above illustration for the second day of The 12 Days of Comic Book Christmas over at the Comics Alliance. It's the first illustration I've done using my new Cintiq tablet. I'm making the move over to digitally creating my comics in an effort to increase my production, save time, expedite my process, etc. Still getting used to it, but I'm surprised at how much the digital drawings look like my traditional-medium drawings.

Matt Seneca wrote a beautiful analysis of my artwork in NIGHT BUSINESS, ISSUE 1, earlier this month over on his blog DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE. Go read it here. Specifically, Panel 3 on Page 13. Actually, Matt verbalizes my artistic goals with NIGHT BUSINESS and my other comics better than I ever could. I think my comic book art is about re-seeing or paying tribute to comic art traditions from the past, from Kirby, to Gulacy. To the anonymous, assembly-line artists from the '40s who unknowingly birthed the form, thinking themselves artistic failures and drowning their sorrows in alcohol. To the crime and horror comic artists who drew the flawed ire of Fredric Wertham and were eventually, unfairly targeted for political purposes by Sen. Joe McCarthy. Anyway, Matt writes brilliantly about comics and I feel humbled my stuff would be a subject for his words.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Close to the end of last Sunday's CNN's Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz got a brief quote from Ms. Dowd responding to the comic book, BENJAMIN MARRA'S THE INCREDIBLY FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF MAUREEN DOWD (A WORK OF SATIRE AND FICTION) with a nice funny-book joke:

As an intrepid reporter myself, I asked Dowd for her reaction. "I never read anything about myself," she said. "It's debilitating, like Kryptonite."